Google's N-Gram viewer

Google N-gram viewer

This software is freely available through google, but its scope is very limited. It uses Google Books, which has books dating back centuries that are digitized and can be searched for specific terms. Because of this, it was possible to search through every book on Google Books for a search term and see when and how it was being used over time.

This is a useful tool for linguists, but also for English scholars in a broader sense, because it shows the use of language over time. A linguist might use it to study language changes over time, but a researcher in literature might use it to compare how a term was being used in one text to how common the term is at that time, or how it is being used in other works of the same period.

Searching and N-gram graphs.

My first search on the N-gram viewer was for the word “teenagers” because I knew from my undergrad capstone that the concept is a fairly new one. As expected, the N-gram graph shows that the word does not come into existence until around the 1940’s, and then it quickly picks up in use.

As you can see from this screen, I have limited the search parameters to uses between 1935 and 1960. This was done because default search parameters showed that the term doesn’t exist until around 1935, but with the broader search parameters it was difficult to see exactly when the term first gained prominence.

Decreasing the search parameters even further to being between 1935 and 1950 shows a low frequency until 1940 and then a sharp increase. This agrees with the culture of that period of time. With the ending of the Second World War and the Great Depression, America entered into a period of prosperity. This allowed for more leisure time which allowed for our current schemas of teenagers to develop, as shown by looking at the context of the search term.

Context

If you click on the year ranges at the bottom of the screen, Google’s N-gram viewer will return every instance of the search term depicted in the graph for that range. As shown in the previous image, the first range is between 1935 and 1943.

When sorted by relevance, the term “teenager” is typically used in reports and studies. As shown below, the first 3 results are a pamphlet, a report, and a study on sleep and academics. The other 8 sources are more of the same. This shows that teenagers weren’t yet the subcultural group that we know them of today, but rather existed more for sociological classification.

The range of 1951 to 1957 is the first time we see teenagers referred to the way that we are used to now. The third result from the American Lutheran talks about how parents in 1954 were struggling to understand their unruly teenagers.

To give some perspective, the following image shows the snippet view of the text in question. This shows that teenagers in the mid-fifties were being somewhat rebellious. To the modern eye, this is an amusing complaint about teenagers in comparison to modern day. However, this snippet is all that is available through Google. One limitation of the Google N-gram viewer is that it doesn’t always have the full text of the book available. This can be frustrating because the context might be too limited in the snippet view for a researcher’s needs.

Overall, Google’s N-gram viewer is useful for starting research or seeing how terms are used in specific time periods, but should probably not be used for serious research.

In addition to having a limited scope, it often produced incorrect results because of the way that Google Books are archived. The following image shows a search for video games with results dating back to 1945. This is impossible because the first video game in history isn’t revealed until 1950, and video games developed for the public don’t exist until the 1970’s.

Clicking on the entry for context shows that the original publication date is 1945, but the section containing the search term is from 1990. This is likely do a minor error and wouldn’t skew the results that much if there were more of them. However, this inaccuracies make the tool more difficult and frustrating to use.